The introduction sets out the book’s analytical framework. It begins with the long history of gendered state power, then discusses previous scholarship on early modern policing and its entanglement with the history of officeholding. It shows how both subjects are connected to the history of state formation and explains how the book bridges the gap between them. The central arguments of the book are outlined and the key categories of sources introduced.

This chapter sets out the relationship between local officeholding and the central institution of gendered power in early modern society: the household. Throughout the early modern period, most officeholders were also heads of household. This was the result of legal and social ideas about who should wield state authority; only those who were economically, socially, and domestically ‘independent’ were seen as possessing the necessary capacity for responsible decision-making. In practice, this generally meant middle-aged married men of the middling sort, who dominated most local offices. These men were expected to exercise patriarchal control over others, which brought them into conflict with other men who resented their intrusions as an affront to their own sense of manhood. In many of these cases, policing was characterised by clashes between competing modes of masculinity. It was not, however, an exclusively male domain. Male officers’ wives took part in their husbands’ duties, while women who headed their own households held office in their own right.

The conclusion summarises the overall argument of the book and reflects on its contributions to different historical fields. It then takes the story forward in time. In several important ways, policing in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed along lines set down in the early modern period: separation of office from household, impersonal models of authority, and fraternal forms of official masculinity.

This chapter shows how changes to officeholding shaped practices of arrest in the capital. It uses a new dataset to rethink established accounts of early modern policing based on widespread participation. Most arrests in London were made by men and, from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, a growing proportion were made by officers. At the same time, constables and their colleagues acquired greater powers to arrest people on the basis of suspicion alone. These powers were frequently used against poorer women, who officers arrested on ill-defined charges of vagrancy, night-walking, or suspected theft. In the early eighteenth century one judge called for closer adherence to due process in such arrests, but this had little long-term effect.

This chapter traces the emergence of a new kind of official masculinity which was not rooted in the household. In the mid-seventeenth century, some lawyers attempted unsuccessfully to exclude women from officeholding entirely by arguing that gender trumped householder status as a qualification for office. Also in the mid-seventeenth century, the new system of indirect excise taxation produced a new kind of officer: young, unmarried, and always male. Excisemen were derided for lacking the independence of traditional householder officers and their wives (if they did marry) were prohibited from taking part in official business. This complete separation of office and household began to be mirrored by London constables and watchmen in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Householders chosen to hold these offices increasingly hired deputies to serve for them, and deputies tended to be poorer than their principals. Many were either younger or older than middle-age and often unmarried. In the course of working and socialising together year after year, these deputies developed a culture of fraternal masculinity based on solidarity, drinking, misogyny, and violence.

This chapter shows how changes to officeholding shaped practices of searching in the capital. Searches are a neglected feature of the history of law enforcement. Common law protected houses from being searched, except in pursuit of suspected criminals. Even then, searching houses required the presence of officers with specific warrants. Those who did not have houses of their own were less able to resist searches by non-officers or searches without warrants. Searches of people were entirely unregulated, restricted only by cultural norms about gender and social status. The poor were less able to resist being searched than the rich. Women could insist that they were searched by other women for the sake of modesty, though this was not always successful. Women were much more likely to be invasively searched than men. Searches of women by officers were especially intrusive and sometimes violent, giving tangible expression to the links between policing and gendered power.